Punters unmoved by recent events
If Sir Keir Starmer is ousted in the next few months I suspect the Labour price might improve as new Prime Ministers usually get a bounce, even Liz Truss experienced a bounce. TSE
How HMRC could turn the leadership ambitions of Angela into ashes
Anyone who has dealt with HMRC in the last few years will know the infuriatingly slow place of HMRC so this story will be familiar. Angela Rayner is trying to out the issues of her tax minimisation strategies that led to her resignation as Deputy Prime Minister because she and her colleagues know she cannot run whilst this investigation isn’t resolved, as The Telegraph reports Almost six months on, there is still no sign of the taxman’s findings, with some…
18 months in
Today is the nineteenth month anniversary of Sir Keir Starmer becoming Prime Minister and it feels longer to me, it undoubtedly feels even longer for Sir Keir, I find this polling intriguing on several fronts. Firstly the self inflicted nature of them and the poor communications around them, secondly the u-turns and the lack of credit therein, third policies seem mater more than froth issues like freebiegate, and fourthly it will be difficult to cut the benefits of pensioners. TSE
Rage against the machine – charting the rise of outsider parties
A moment I remember from the 2015 election is when a TV interviewer was asking a series of vox pops and one respondent replied he was deciding between UKIP and the Greens. I recall this as we tend to think of politics as being organized along two axes: one economic, between capitalism and socialism, and the other cultural, between Remainers and Brexiteers. I would argue for a third axis of insider vs. outsider parties. I would define these as follows:…
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, Starmer’s Pincher moment
In one of those amusing ironies I have spent the afternoon participating in a seminar about ethics & probity and my answer to every situation was ‘What would Lord Mandelson do in this situation and do the exact opposite’. A usually successful rule on political betting is betting on something not happening but I think we are at the end of the days for the Starmer premiership, and Starmer’s explanation reminded me of the Chris Pincher scandal which ended Boris…
If this is what happens in the midterms then the Republicans are in for a shellacking
TSE
Why pictures are so important, could Lord Mandelson’s underwear cost Lab the Gorton & Denton by-election?
Lord Mandelson photographed in his underwear is one of those images that will not be forgotten it says more about something than a magnum opus on the subject ever could. I suspect this is going to be sub-optimal for Sir Keir Starmer and Labour’s polling in the short term at least, I suspect Sir Keir Starmer finds the whole scandal a bit pants. TSE
You Rub My Back ….
Good old Mandy! There is so much to unpick and enjoy in the Epstein revelations – from the state of Mandy’s underwear to potential criminality: breaches of the Official Secrets Act, the Nolan Principles of Public Life (largely ignored by people in public life), passing on of confidential information, possibly also unpublished price sensitive information and, who knows, insider dealing on the back of it, corruption, misconduct in public office, tax shenanigans and so on. The commentators and journalists will…